advice on publishing

[SimonDoom]

I will note this: Every single one of your posts in this thread is full of grammar and punctuation errors. That leads me to believe that you are being far more careless in your submissions than you think you are. I'm not trying to be critical; it's an observation. If you like you could submit a couple of paragraphs (no more) in a post in this thread for review by the authors here.

 

[dasgoodshit]

oh I'm going to submit again and again until published THIS IS PERSONAL. The latest is i spent hours proofreading, and it was rejected because I had 2 spaces after a full stop instead of one. Really? 28 pages long and they reject it becasue of one space.? There is decidedly worst published on here. Maybe the moderator should change their title to 'nitpicker'

Bro.

1. CTRL-H (find and replace)
2. In the "find" field, type a comma (",")
3. In the "replace" field, type a comma with a space (", ")
4. Click replace all
5. Do it again, but this time, put two spaces in the find field (" ")
6. In the replace field, put a single space.
7. Replace all
8. Do steps 5-7 one more time, in case you already had a space after a comma somewhere before you did steps 2-4

BOOM. All of your punctuation issues are solved, instantly.

 

[alohadave]

There's plenty of folk who double space after sentences, and if they don't catch it, the Lit text scrubber will. We have many writers here say that happens, for sure.

There's nothing that even needs to be done. HTML automatically strips out extra whitespace when it displays it. I have four spaces between these two sentences.

 

[BobbyLaker]

Copy your text into the Lit submission form, Preview, Submit.

You're either trying to format like a book, or your text is full of unwanted html. You have to go as raw as possible - no indents, left justified, two returns at the end of each paragraph (forget about Word para spacing, that's irrelevant), minimise italics and bold.

Take a big breath, stop being angry, and get your text as raw as possible. Copying into the Lit submission form is foolproof, that's why it's there.

Thanks for this.
Should be useful as I approach my first submisison.

 

[BobbyLaker]

I work in Gmail drafts. If I highlight a word and ctrl-f it highlights all the other instances. Right click on a highlight and I have a search in Google option. My work is available on any machine. Other options like Google docs or a local copy in any program lack one or more of these features.

How do you get on with the spellchecker?

I edited my first submission (UK English) in Google Docs - big mistake; though writing the story in it worked well enough.

My second, I edited in MS Word. It found loads of stuff missed by G-Docs.

 

[djrip]

How do you get on with the spellchecker?

I edited my first submission (UK English) in Google Docs - big mistake; though writing the story in it worked well enough.

My second, I edited in MS Word. It found loads of stuff missed by G-Docs.

Sometimes I'll paste it into word for an additional spell check at the end.

 

[Zandrite]

Questions from the recently rejected:

I can see from reading this thread where some of my formatting problems might lie. Still, I am wondering a few things that might help me have a successful resubmission.

Context: My submission is a play. I was attempting to remain faithful to script formatting.

I was told that there might be hard returns in the middle of sentences, and that this is likely an issue I am being flagged for. The trouble is, I know there must be breaks in the middle of sentences... because the play is written in verse. Some sentences are going to appear on multiple lines like that if I want to keep it in verse.

Is there a strategy for getting around this?

Should I be posting this under poetry instead? Would that make a difference?

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Did you put all the necessary HTML tags for the linebreaks in it yourself? I think if it was preformatted the site's editor might like it better since it was less work for them.

 

[KeithD]

Questions from the recently rejected:



Is there a strategy for getting around this?

Mark line breaks with a slant line: /

 

[ElectricBlue]

Should I be posting this under poetry instead? Would that make a difference?

I doubt it.

As 29wordsforsnow suggests, it sounds like you need to force line returns - but I have no idea what html you need to do that.

 

[onehitwanda]

Be aware that Lit also seems to strip multiline HTML tags, as I found recently to my detriment. Every line that needs to be marked up in a certain way needs to be enclosed in its own markup tags or the tags will be stripped.